Kuwait Finance House Teams Up With Visa For Mobile Wallet

To roll out a mobile wallet for its credit and prepaid Visa cardholders, Kuwait Finance House (KFH) teamed up with Visa. The wallet will use Visa’s token service, and KFH Chief Retail and Private Banking Officer Waleed Khaled Mandani said to the media that the tie-up will help its customers use the newest technologies for payments on the market, according to reports.

The news comes as Visa introduced Token Management Service (TMS), a token aggregation solution that gives Visa merchants a single view of customers across all the channels they shop and payments methods they use when shopping there, without a heavy IT lift or the need to change their existing token service provider relationships. In a prior interview with PYMNTS, Senior Vice President of Visa CyberSource Andre Machicao said that TMS had been a few years in the making, framed specifically to give merchants an effective way to close the omnichannel gap and create a truly integrated customer experience.

TMS, Machicao had said, abstracts the complexity associated with managing token silos so that merchants truly have a single, comprehensive look at the customer across all methods of payment, including alternative payments methods, rewards points as currency and merchant loyalty programs. This also includes the ability to scale as shopping channels and destinations — think geographies — proliferated.

The news comes as Visa made an investment in YellowPepper to accelerate the adoption of mobile payments and tokenization in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to Visa in an announcement.

Eduardo Coello, regional president for Visa Latin America and the Caribbean, said in the announcement, “Through our investment in YellowPepper, we want to bring the best of Visa’s technology and capabilities to a broader set of partners and clients across the region. Visa is always looking for new investments that allow us to accelerate innovation for our clients, finding new ways to support our clients’ technology.”